1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates generally to clock signal management, and more particularly to apparatus, devices, methods, and processors for managing clock rates for a number of timers.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablet computers have become increasingly sophisticated. In addition to supporting telephone calls, many mobile devices now provide access to the internet, email, text messaging, and navigation using the global positioning system (GPS). Mobile devices that support such sophisticated functionality often include many components. In such mobile devices, one component, such as a processor, may be configured to monitor the ‘health’ or activity of such components to ensure that all components are operating in an expected manner. In such embodiments, the processor may maintain a separate timer (such as a timeout counter) for each component. During a period of inactivity, the timer runs until one of two actions occur: the timer runs for a predefined period of time (the counter increments until reaching a threshold counter value) or the component becomes active. In the latter case, the timer restarts. In the former case, the lack of activity for the predefined period of time may indicate a failure of the component and the timer may provide an asynchronous interrupt to the processor.
Each timer is generally implemented as a counter and all counters are generally implemented as the same size. For example, in some prior art systems, a processor may maintain many 32-bit timeout counters, each of which increments on the same clock rate. The time of inactivity of a component that indicates a component's failure, however, may vary from component to component. A Bluetooth device, for example, may be inactive far longer than a cache or memory bus before such inactivity represents a failure. As such, counters of the same size for each device are an inefficient utilization of area and inefficiently consume power.